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摘要

A ccording to London Councils, the apolitical representative body that lobbies on behalf of London's 33 boroughs, 133,000 additional school places will be needed in the capital by 2018, almost a third of the figure required for the whole of the UK. Moreover, it is expected that many of London's boroughs will fail to meet demand for school places over the next few years. This has obviously a placed a huge amount of pressure on school development within London. One consequence has been that schools in the capital are increasingly being procured via Section 106 agreements, with traditional housebuilders now often constructing schools directly in order to satisfy planning gain requirements. Additionally, with space for new schools being sparse, particularly in dense inner London, planners, developers and designers are being forced to become ever more creative as to where schools are located. As it happens this is a mandate that has received tacit political encouragement with the concurrent expansion of free schools which, with some controversy, has thus far placed schoolchildren in locations as improbable as airbases and fire stations.